Well This 24+ Year Linux Vet Just Got Impressed by AVL Mx Edition 23.2

[enorbet2]

Title says a lot but I'd like to explain how and why. I'm really ancient, been in the Music Biz for well over a half century and a proud Slackware Linux user/admin for over 23 years. I'm also a long time multibooter from even back in DOS days. My first GUI aside from DOS Shells was OS/2 2.1. Later with OS/2 Warp 4 I got introduced to Linux when emx runtimes made it possible to substitute the Enlightenment DE for IBM's Workplace. I've not only multibboted forever but kept up with Enlightenment even though I gradually began to prefer KDE.

Because I am a musician/engineer who has been involved in recording since ~1970 and evolved into digital recording around 1998 and shortly wanting desperately to dump Windows, I worked to learn the earliest ALSA system and installed Ardour when it was pre Alpha, before it had install instructions. This worked quite well for me until Pulseaudio invaded. Hey if you like it no biggie but I despise pulse. I was cautiously enthusiastic when Pipewire began to shove an elbow into Pulse's ribs. Pipewire recently has gotten quite good but when I upgraded from my PCIe Essence II card to an external Focusrite USB DAC/Mixer I began a long wrestling match with Pipewire and especially complicated by wanting DaVinci Resolve to work properly with Pipewire and USB Audio, I've been fighting this losing battle for months.

Initially I had a few minor hiccups with AVL like ancient Nvidia drivers. Today I purged the old drivers and ran the Nvidia-575.63-foo.run installer and it was a piece of delicious cake. Then to my utter shock, with zero Preference adjustments and zero Wireplumber or Jack routing tweaks DaVinci Resolve not only ran fine but all appropriate Audio and Video just ran perfectly!!! This is on the Free version which all but requires .mov format. I've wanted to buy a license for Full Studio version but past experience made me wait until I could confirm it worked properly on Linux. That time is TODAY! and I couldn't be more impressed and happy.

Many thanks to the devs who built AV Linux Mx Edition.

[Eadwine Rose]

Moved into the respins forum.

[AVLinux]

Hi @enorbet2

Welcome and thanks for the encouraging words. AVL 23 was the first version to feature Enlightenment and it was not a very well received change in general. I lost a lot of Users and my Distrowatch rating took a beating (oddly the page views are stronger than ever..?). I don't live or die by these things and I personally love Enlightenment and am going to continue with it for upcoming AVL 25 as well as adding a Moksha ISO. I'm intrigued and happy (and maybe a little envious...lol) to hear about your success with Davinci Resolve on Linux. Last year I tried unsuccessfully to get it running reliably and with my AMD Graphics card I was out of luck without special Kernels and added AMD proprietary Repos so I bought a brand new nVidia 4080 SUPER and it was disastrous, the Linux Driver was terrible even with the latest nVidia development Repo drivers and I had numerous Video glitches in daily use and Davinci Resolve crashed repeatedly so I ended up selling the card at a loss and keeping Davinci Resolve Studio work on my Windows 10 partition.. My point is that on any Linux variant Davinci Resolve is a VERY delicate balance of what exact nVidia card you have, both too new and too old will not work and AMD is a real PITA. In truth the excellent nVidia Installer is the work of the MX Linux developers to the benefit of all.

I'm very glad to hear you're having a good experience with AVL and I really appreciate you taking the time to share that here!

[enorbet2]

First, you're welcome and let me add that while I have little problem navigating Enlightenment and respect it's low footprint that is still able to maintain substantial "eye candy", functionally I prefer Xfce or especially KDE and I found it unusually effortless to add those WMs in AVL. Many if not most distros require numerous additional packages, a lot of going back into package management to get anywhere near a fully functional WM. This level of Minimalism makes little sense to me in 2025 and this is from someone who competed on IRC back in the early days to roll a kernel that would fit on a 1.5MB Floppy. These days a 250GB SSD can be had for roughly $20 USD and having used "real estate" on a drive has zero impact on resources and performance as long as sufficient Free Space is maintained...pretty effortless on even dual OpSys systems with 250GB storage overall.

To recap, besides tweaking Slackware with Studioware tools, I have installed and used both OpenSuse (3 flavors including Studio) and 3 versions of Ubuntu Studio. Ubuntu had an edge for a version because I could totally eliminate Pulseaudio and have Pipewire and Pipewire controlled ALSA but Canonical ruined that when the next version incorporated SNAP. Right now after years of work in Audio/Video production I can say without hesitation that AV Linux Mx Edition, is the very best Studio Distro I've ever experienced including very very early distros like from around 2002.

I should add I say that with some chagrin since I really do prefer the unbridled power and freedom of Slackware but it looks like as is rather common, given that even Mr Torvalds says he prefers silence, Slackwaree will be some time before it advances in A/V work sufficiently to be my All-In-One again. For the time being, I will dual boot. AVL _Mx is THAT GOOD! Keep up the great work!

[enorbet2]

OK I have a very serious problem and suggestion. Being a 24+ year user/admin with Slackware I prefer/expect COMPLETE ADMIN CONTROL! This means I $#*$# HATE any system that goes behind my back and tries to undo deep level customization I need, especially without asking for my confirmation.

For a prime example - AVL Mx Edition 23.2 ships with positively ancient nvidia drivers that WILL NOT WORK with modern GPUs like my already somewhat outdated 4070 Ti Super. Kudos for making it easy to install newer ones BUT I positively despise that the system will sometimes automatically try to revert to the ancient driver. It has caused me hours of work and I NEVER want to deal with that insanity ever again.

Now that I've vented and am beginning to calm down please tell me how I can lock a driver or configuration in on AVL so it remains flexible to me, but zero automation will take over and cause any reverting to crap that won't work. I don't need nor want an underfoot Butler. Let me be the responsible admin. If I screw up, I'll know at least what went wrong - ME!, and the last thing I did. Naturally I will also look for answers but I'd like to hear from you AVLinux since you seem sincerely proud and interested in your creation as you well should be. I recognize this is likely not an AVL issue but a Debian one but your experience is valuable to me and I await your response.

[AVLinux]

OK I have a very serious problem and suggestion. Being a 24+ year user/admin with Slackware I prefer/expect COMPLETE ADMIN CONTROL! This means I $#*$# HATE any system that goes behind my back and tries to undo deep level customization I need, especially without asking for my confirmation.

For a prime example - AVL Mx Edition 23.2 ships with positively ancient nvidia drivers that WILL NOT WORK with modern GPUs like my already somewhat outdated 4070 Ti Super. Kudos for making it easy to install newer ones BUT I positively despise that the system will sometimes automatically try to revert to the ancient driver. It has caused me hours of work and I NEVER want to deal with that insanity ever again.

Now that I've vented and am beginning to calm down please tell me how I can lock a driver or configuration in on AVL so it remains flexible to me, but zero automation will take over and cause any reverting to crap that won't work. I don't need nor want an underfoot Butler. Let me be the responsible admin. If I screw up, I'll know at least what went wrong - ME!, and the last thing I did. Naturally I will also look for answers but I'd like to hear from you AVLinux since you seem sincerely proud and interested in your creation as you well should be. I recognize this is likely not an AVL issue but a Debian one but your experience is valuable to me and I await your response.

Hi,

OK, The chassis and wheels of AVL is MX and Debian and I do not touch or influence anything at the depth of Video Drivers at all, I work on top of them. Debian Bookworm indeed has very old nVidia drivers for reasons I'm not privy too. MX provides their handy 'ddm-mx' (aka nVidia Driver Installer) in MX Tools and the latest version of that tool will even fetch the newest Drivers from the nVidia development Repo. I'm afraid I don't understand your concern about maintaining a particular Driver on the system. Essentially Debian's handling of nVidia drivers has always been a weak point and MX has upped the game considerably by making things both much easier and greatly expanding the Drivers available. Can you please explain more specifically what the issue is?

[rokytnji.1]

Howdy enorbet.

Glad things are working out using AVL.
I ran it for a bit. On older equip. then yours I bet.
AVLinux probably has all the answers you may need since he is the main Developer of AVL.

[enorbet2]

Hi,

OK, The chassis and wheels of AVL is MX and Debian and I do not touch or influence anything at the depth of Video Drivers at all, I work on top of them. Debian Bookworm indeed has very old nVidia drivers for reasons I'm not privy too. MX provides their handy 'ddm-mx' (aka nVidia Driver Installer) in MX Tools and the latest version of that tool will even fetch the newest Drivers from the nVidia development Repo. I'm afraid I don't understand your concern about maintaining a particular Driver on the system. Essentially Debian's handling of nVidia drivers has always been a weak point and MX has upped the game considerably by making things both much easier and greatly expanding the Drivers available. Can you please explain more specifically what the issue is?

Firstly please allow me to apologize for being a tad intense. Ultimately, it's my fault being unfamiliar with much deep level work on automated distros. I was actually both surprised and pleased that it was easy to find simple, succinct directions for uninstalling the .db nvidia package and dropping out of X11 into CLI, login as root, and use the vastkly preferred "NVIDIA-foo.run installer. It even asked if IO wanted the driver registered with DKMS! Kudos!

The conflict came at the tail end of a massive, many months long struggle to get DaVinci Resolve working on any Linux distro but preferably with my RTX 4070 Ti Super and Focusriote USB Audio. Each one of those can present problems and all 3 together can interact in ways that has sometimes made me want to yank out my hair in clumps. DaVinci with the 4070 Ti Superrequires FAR newer drivers than available on any repo I've seen. That's not a deal breaker as I prefer the .run installer anyway.

I suppose this is a mixed message since once again it is likely partly my ignorance with Debian/Mx/AVL but at first, as installing AVL began as a test, I installed it on a secondary drive that I load in a IcyDock M.2 Caddy in order to keep test distros (especially those new to me) entirely separate from my Main. I was so pleased that AVL basically just worked with DaVinci once I installed the latest Nvidia drivers (no other distro, and I've tried dozens!) worked so well so easily) that after a few days I pondered installing AVL on my Main M.2 drive.

Going on my Main I was super careful to prepare carefully, making room, building partitions and labeling them to avoid mistakes and installed AVL a 2nd time. I haven't the faintest clue what I did differently. for example I used the same "makeresolvedeb.sh" script to repackage DaVinci Resolve, but on the new install, Resolve launches but importing any video/audio file displays a blank clip, no video, no audio. I'm confidant it's just some library issue but can't figure out what I must've installed on the 1st that I didn't on the 2nd that would've updated such a library. Unfortunately that's one of the main issues why I've stuck with Slackware for 24+ years. Everything is logged. Nothing happens, especially upgrades, that I don't know about and approve.

Anyway the previous rant was because I'd found an nvidia-decode package I thought I might need to solve what could be an encoder/decoder issue but it was not version labelled.I figured, well it's an automated system so it will warn me with what packages were proposed to install and remove and allow me to Yeah or nay. It didn't. It installed that ancient 300 series default Nvidia driver and deleted the 575x module I had installed. I was flabbergasted and envisioned many days to recover and it was then I wrote my previous response. Sorry. It was actually pretty easy to get back the proper driver. Kudos, yet again.

I'm presently not certain if I should just wipe the new install and start again, or "dd" the one that works so well on the wrong drive and simply edit fstab, initramfs, and bootloader to reflect the drive/partition change. I'll probably try a reinstall to learn more about how AVL works since I'll always have the fallback working system.

One important issue I'd like to address that is holding me back on the 2nd install is that there is a sweet little Alsa-Scarlett script that is extremely useful for checking and changing Focusrite firmware as well as routing and several other functions I'd really like to have but it requires at least a 6.7.x kernel. I am an old veteran kernel builder but i dislike initrd usage and since I don't encrypt the root filesystem, most often I don't need one. I followed the AVL/Debian instructions for building kernel from source(I chose a 6.12.41 version) and everything went fine up until "make install". Normally I just do all that copying from "/usr/src/linux" to "/boot" manually but since AVL prefers GRUB and an initrd I figured I'd better stick to Debian methods. Oddly it copied the config, vmlinuz and System.map files to /boot but reported it had failed. Naturally trying to run any sort of GRUB or Initramfs update fails too. Thankfully, the script didn't delete the default kernel so I can still get in OK just can't work my Focusrite like I want to.

Not to worry. I'll figure it out now that I have a working backup..

[enorbet2]

Heya rokytnji.1!.. Cool to see you here! Has this Spring been good to you?

[AVLinux]

@enorbet2

Hi, a lot to unpack there...lol

First, if you got Davinci Resolve running reliably on AVL with an nVidia card that new then you have succeeded where I failed miserably.. I had been using both Davinci Resolve and Topaz Labs software on Windows and my AMD RX6750XT Video card and the performance was fine with Resolve but encoding times were quite slow with Topaz so I read up and invested in a nVidia 4080 SUPER Video card because using Resolve on Linux with an AMD card was a kludgefest of special Kernels, propriety AMD Repositories and witchcraft... So naive me thought nVidia would solve all my issues and also bring Resolve onto my Linux partition and it didn't happen at all. Back then the newest nVidia driver was the 565 and whether I installed it with ddm-mx or directly with the .run nVidia drivers it was was a Video flakefest on the Linux side and Resolve would repeatedly crash within 30 seconds of launch.. After 6 months of testing and torture I sold the nVidia card at a loss and reinstalled the AMD and left Resolve on my Windows partition..

Further to that, Resolve on Linux doesn't open .mp4 files and doesn't support Linux VST3 Audio Plugins, they aren't exactly lying to say it works on Linux but it is by FAR a degraded experience..

Now some things you may not know:

There is an 'apt-history' command you can run in a terminal and it will show you a record of all packaging activity on the system, upgrades, removals etc. etc.

You never need to compile a Kernel on MX ever, they maintain the updates of Debian Kernels as well as keeping pace with the Liquorix Kernels that AVL uses. AVL uses the MX 'ahs' Repo so it always has access to the latest Kernels. Simply go into MXPI (MX Package Installer) and search 'linux-image' and marvel at the choices. If you install a Kernel upgrade in a addition to your running Kernel and it doesn't suit you you can simply uninstall it like any other Debian package and then try another.

As far as a reinstall you may want to hold off for a month. Debian has just released their new Stable 'Trixie' version and AVL will be upgrading to a Trixie base. I will start putting up Release Candidate ISO's in the next couple of weeks and then releasing AVL-MXe 25 once I get some User testing feedback. I would highly recommend upgrading to the newer version when the time comes., there are numerous fixes and improvements over AVL 23.2.